RWBG

MA programs can be what you make of them. I did a one-year MA at a Canadian school, spent 3/8 of my degree in the econ department, and applied as an IR formal theory/methods applicant; things went fine for me. I can think of at least one other formal theory/methods type who applied from a Canadian MA program and did well (McGill I think it was). In general, I see a number of people getting into great Ph.D programs in the U.S. from UBC, Toronto, and McGill MA programs. Also, I've gotten the impression that Canadian MAs are on average more "academic" than US MA programs, probably because most Canadians do an MA before their Ph.D; it's a relatively small subset of U.S. MA programs that seem academically (not professionally) focused (e.g. Chicago's CIR and MAPSS programs).

It's marketed as a professional master's program, and a lot of the courses are directed towards preparing you for non-academic work to some extent (evaluations, etc. may be designed to teach you practical skills). I also think there's an internship component. Broad variety of people with different backgrounds enter the program. Some of the profs who teach for it are fairly well known (e.g. Louis Pauly) and the Munk Centre itself has been the host of International Organization for the past term, under Pauly and Adler. Generally, I think you'd get the Toronto brand (and maybe the Munk Centre brand) more than any MGA-program specific brand in terms of reputation, given how new the program is. This might be a question to ask the government affairs section, given that the MGA program doesn't really bill itself as an academic program.

Don't think so. You'll be facing a different committee, and schools reject lots of applicants all the time, so it's unlikely that anyone who was on the committee two years ago would even remember your application. Two of the schools I was admitted to turned me down last year, and there was never any indication while talking to people at either school that they remembered that I had applied previously.

Yeah, although I don't think I'd call Stanford GSB's political economics a business school in anything other than name, and it looks like he was cross-listed in the political science department. I also want to continue to stress that both Diermeier and Feddersen (as well as Austen-Smith for that matter) are really unique/exceptional scholars from whom I think one should avoid making any generalizable inferences. Some of the top formal theorists in the world have ended up at Stanford GSB polecon and Kellogg Decision Sciences. Outside that very, very small subset, I don't think you'd find many other examples of this.

I think Diermeier and Feddersen are pretty far from typical, and weren't hired "straight out of their doctorate." Moreover, Kellogg's Decision Sciences is kind of an outlier amongst business schools in terms of willingness to hire formal political theorists.

I haven't; to be honest, I was leaning towards my current choice over NYU anyways, so I didn't think it would make much sense to lobby them that heavily only to turn them down. That being said, I would have given them serious consideration if they had admitted me or put me on an official waitlist. As it is, I'm going with a program that has signalled they actually want me to come

I know I already posted about this in the recruitment visit mailing lists thread, but with the conference coming up I thought I'd check again to see if I could catch anyone else who wants to be added to the list I've set up. We'll probably go for drinks at some point, so let me know if you're interested.

I think I recall that people who e-mailed Thom Wall got a response pretty quickly; I would try that. In contrast, I still haven't heard from NYU, and they won't even confirm rejection by e-mail. I just gave up and made my decision.

So I'm trying to get my head around how taxes are going to work as a Canadian who is going to be doing my Ph.D in the U.S. As I understand it, Canadians have to pay federal and state income tax in the U.S., but can claim the U.S. federal income tax paid as a tax credit when filing in Canada so that they only have to pay the difference between what they would have paid in Canada and what they actually paid in the U.S. So what happens if you paid more in the U.S. than you would have paid in Canada? Do you get a tax refund? Because non-resident aliens can't claim the standard deduction, I'm pretty sure the total tax paid to the IRS on my stipend will be higher than what I would have paid in Canada... however, it's also possible that I'm completely misunderstanding the tax law, and nothing I've said here makes any sense. Help?

With a heavy heart, I have turned down my offer from Rochester, a 2-year fellowship + 3-year teaching commitment offer from UCLA, and my 5-year teaching commitment offer from Madison. All great schools; turning down Rochester especially may keep me up at night.

So Rochester's great. Department's really serious about training grad students, and a lot of really good people self-select into the program (a number of people had turned down offers from CHYMPS departments to go). Very close knit group of grad students. Kind of wish they had been less good so my decision would be easier. It's obviously an idiosyncratic place, but if you know you want to do formal theory or methods heavy work, I think they stack up well against any department.

If you do want to do formal theory, I wouldn't have MIT on the list. Michigan polisci would be good for your interests I would think? A higher GREQ would help.

Congrats CairoKid! On a different note, has everyone finished hearing from NYU (either acceptance, rejection, or MA offer)? I still haven't heard anything from them, which seems a little curious. I even e-mailed them to get confirmation of my rejection (and to withdraw from consideration for the MA program if that's what was going on) and just got the standard "all applications are being processed and applicants will be notified in due time" spiel.

I know the conversation has shifted a little bit from the posting of data about the specific schools, but I thought I'd give a thought or two about Michigan. I'd read some stuff on this board and heard rumors from others that the departmental culture was really competitive, and supervision wasn't that close, but my impressions while visiting were precisely the opposite. Everyone there seemed really, really friendly, and extremely invested in their students. Moreover, when talking to grad students, they often mentioned the accessibility of the faculty as one of the biggest strengths of the department. My impression is that the training there is really great, and there appears to be a departmental culture of emphasizing epistemic rigor in the work of faculty and students, irrespective of whether they're qual/quant/formal (for instance, amongst the formal types, there was a lot of self-conscious discussion about when models can be epistemically valuable). Personally, I really liked Michigan.

Yeah, political economy's always a bit of an odd area, given that a lot of the best people do work across several subfields (American, IR, comparative). Michigan seems to have a lot of people doing great work at the intersection of comparative and something else, e.g. comparative and IR, comparative and American. Most of the people also have strong methods interests. However, I don't know whether there's much that would lead to an increase in ranking since 2009. Amongst people I know, Koremenos and Tsebelis are fairly new, but they still both came in around 2007. Most of the heavy hitters I know there have been there for a little while. Brian Min is new and great, but very junior. The only reason I could see them going up is if there's a 2-3 year lag between changes in a department and increases in ranking (which I suppose is a reasonable possibility for reputation rankings).

Usually, they're pretty good about allowing you extensions on the 3 months if you haven't written the test yet. However, I think if you're taking TOO much longer than that to prepare, you might start forgetting stuff!

Heh, well I'm not working for Kaplan anymore, so I'm not too worried about whether you were trying to insult them or not! In any event, no, I didn't interpret it that way. As to your second point, I thought about that as I was writing the part about structuring your time, and I think there's some truth to it. However, you may have an easier time being self-motivated when you're doing something you (presumably) actually care about (i.e. your research) than when you're doing something (the GRE) that you may very well think is a waste of time. I think so. I'd call and check to make sure they have all the practice tests and SmartReports (the diagnostic tool that tells you after practice tests what to work on). If it's JUST the quiz bank tool, then I think it will be useful, but you'll really want the practice tests. If you do this... http://www.kaptest.com/GRE/Prep-for-the-New-GRE/On-Demand/gre-on-demand.html ...it comes with the books, flashcards, etc. that can be useful as well (though in my view, less useful than the quiz bank and practice tests). However, I think the recorded videos are pretty useless, and kind of unsettling in the way the instructors have a kind of soulless/scripted enthusiasm about them. So, I'd call to clarify the differences between the two options, and then decide whether the price differential is worth it to you.

As a former GMAT/GRE instructor for Kaplan, I'll give my thoughts on the classes. For most people, I'd tend to agree with adblanche that classes aren't particularly useful (although how useful they are may depend somewhat on your instructor, and how much they're willing to work with you/respond to stuff outside of class). A big problem with the GRE classes is that people come into them with a variety of backgrounds, so you may have former engineering students and humanities students both taking a class on algebra GRE questions. The result is, people have very different goals from the class, but the class tends to roughly aim itself towards the median student. It can get a little weird in implementation. However, I will say the class is useful if (1) You know you have difficultly getting yourself to study for this kind of thing/structuring your own time. (2) If you find that you just don't know how to approach the questions when you hit them. If you find you're frequently asking yourself "where do I start?" when doing questions on the GRE, the class focuses on building up a method for approaching questions so that doesn't happen. That can be useful for some people. Beyond that, I think the most important thing is to do a lot of practice tests. Kaplan has an online service that you can purchase without paying for a course (and is much cheaper than a course) that gives you access to a "Quiz Bank" full of practice tests, and lots of verbal and quant questions - I think the online materials are a VERY useful set of resources. Outside the practice tests (and you should get the practice test the ETS releases which uses the "Powerprep" software as well) the Kaplan online service allows you to generate quizzes based on difficulty level and area; you could, for instance, just tell it to generate a 10 question timed quiz using only high-level difficult questions in probability, and thus do targeted practice in a specific area. I've found a lot of people can learn a lot faster by focusing on their weaknesses; the online service also gives you detailed information on your test performance that can be really useful for diagnosing what your weaknesses are. Personally, I think the online resources are well worth the money for most people, and are substantially better than just getting the books. Finally, if finances are not a constraint, a private tutor can be more useful than classes (with the caveat being, of course, that the usefulness is VERY heavily dependent on the tutor in question). A tutor can help to force you to study/make the GRE a priority, can be good at directing to you to what you best need to focus on/diagnosing problems that may effect you on the test, and can help to figure out what precisely you're not understanding about a concept and explain things in a more directed fashion.

What are your interests within political science? Generally, I think your main thing is going to be reading enough of the political science literature to write a statement of purpose that reflects that you understand what you're getting into. Beyond that, from what information you've provided, your profile seems fairly strong.

It's hard to get at the data (gradcafe does not publish more detailed posting statistics that include the time intervals of posting) but I suspect that most superlatives will be awarded to people who've been active since the present cycle began; let's say about since November. In which case, the model would probably look like: pi =(xwi / Σwi) + Ɛi Where pi is the probability any person i ∈ S (where S is the set of all posters who have posted in the past five months on the political science forum) has of winning a superlative, wi is the number of posts (in polisci) by any i∈S over the past 5 months, x is the total number of superlatives awarded, and Ɛ is the error term of the model. Thus, your probability of winning a superlative is your percentage share of total posts times the number of superlatives, with an error term allowing for some variation based on unmeasurable intangibles. Edit: I'll try to think of ways to improve the model. We have data on reputation points, so maybe adjusting pi using some weighting of the number of standard deviations above or below the reputation mean that person is might serve as a proxy variable for "forum impact".

I think departments don't like to hire people from their own school because it makes it seem like that candidate couldn't get a comparable job without the departmental leg up.

I think the election will come down to who owns more Cadillacs. I bet Obama drives, at best, only one. How can he compete?

Sure, but I suspec Sure, but I suspect if you're at a top 10 school, your school's brand name is not going to be pivotal (maybe with Harvard...). As a side note, I think it's a idea to get a list of students placed by your potential advisors, either by asking them or finding out through subtler means. This will give you both an idea of subfield placement, and of course, your potential advisor's connections. Also, re: Wisconsin, at least if you're in IR/IPE I think it's really difficult to estimate future placements based on numbers from the past 5-6 years. Lisa Martin's students placed well when she was at Harvard, and I think you have a group there that's rising in stature (especially with IO moving there later this year).

I agree with this. The broader divisions in placement are important (the reputation of the school you go to will effect your success), but fine differences between schools could easily be just random statistical variation in quality of incoming students, market conditions, and the idiosyncracies of hiring committees. People also go into private practice (voluntarily), return to universities in their home countries, etc. Finally, some schools have extremely high variance in placement (e.g. UCLA) which is something else that should be factored in.

Well, I also haven't heard from NYU. I tried sending an e-mail, and got the whole "decision process is ongoing" spiel. Last year, I remember rejections went out later for people who were being considered for the MA program; I don't remember indicating that I was interested in the MA program, but it's possible I ticked a box somewhere. Do you remember if you did?